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TV vets Dan Redican and Gary Pearson team on Sunnyside

By Bill BriouxSpecial to the Star

Sat., Jan. 3, 2015

There are still residents of Toronto who remember the old Sunnyside amusement park, a fabled midway that once existed on Toronto’s west-end waterfront in the days between the wars. A Coney Island of Canada complete with a merry-go-round (still turning in Disneyland), it was razed in the 1950s to make way for a place of little joy or amusement, the Gardiner Expressway.

From left, Patrice Goodman, Pat Thornton, Kathleen Phillips, Rob Norman, Kevin Vidal, and Alice Moran as just a few of the characters they play in Sunnyside. (Allen Fraser / ROGERS MEDIA)

The sun has long set on that Sunnyside, but this Thursday at 8 p.m. on City, a new Sunnyside emerges. It’s a sketch show, it’s a sitcom and it, too, is an amusement centre — although pretty much centred in the active minds of Dan Redican and Gary Pearson.

While their comedy roots intertwine, Redican and Pearson both took their own twisted paths to Sunnyside. Redican was performing as a puppeteer going way back to his elementary school in Etobicoke. He kept a “hand” in puppetry, working The Jim Henson Hour in Toronto and Groundling Marsh, and later as the hapless human surrounded by cloth killers on Puppets Who Kill.

He’s also a founding member of The Frantics, a comedy troupe that enjoyed success on CBC TV and radio. He wrote and produced for The Kids in the Hall, has written several one-man stage shows and even Mulroney: The Opera. Over the years, if he hasn’t written an episode or two of a Canadian comedy series, he’s been on it.

It was 25 years or so ago when he first started bumping into Pearson on Toronto stages such as the Rivoli. Pearson migrated to Toronto from western Ontario and leapt into sketch comedy. Like Redican, he was part of a comedy troupe, The Chumps, which also had a CBC radio show. He became part of Second City and then embarked on a writing career that took him to Los Angeles for several seasons of MADtv and then across Canada for shows such as This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Corner Gas and his own YTV sketch series, That’s So Weird.

Suffice to say they’re both old enough to have had their hearts broken several times in the Canadian TV business. Undaunted, both were pitching separate show ideas when a miracle happened: a Canadian programming executive, Rogers’ director of original programming Nataline Rodrigues, threw them together to create Sunnyside.

“We both had pitches in at Rogers,” says Pearson, “and they said, ‘We like your pitch, we like Dan’s pitch, but we don’t like either one of them enough to do, so is there any way you could combine then and work together and find a new show that has some of the elements we talked about?’”

That would be yes, they quickly said. Both were pleasantly surprised they weren’t thrown out of the room just for pitching sketch. It’s always been a dirty word in Canadian broadcasting, says Redican.

“When SCTV started there was a mandate out at CBC: no sketch comedy,” he says. “Same with Kids in the Hall.”

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Despite Canada’s long legacy of sketch success, from Wayne & Shuster through Air Farce and This Hour Has 22 Minutes, the ban continues today. Conversations with networks would start with the phrase, “Don’t give us any sketch comedy,” says Pearson. “This time they were saying give us sketch,” says Redican. “That was unusual.”

Redican’s original pitch, titled Our Street, was more about relationships and neighbourhoods. Pearson had an idea centred around a weird coffee shop called Dark Roast. They started imagining a world “that had a twist around every corner,” says Pearson, “and there’s a magical element as well.”

Once they got a green light, Sunnyside came together incredibly fast. A pilot was commissioned one year ago. Pearson and Redican sat down with Toronto improv player Kathleen Phillips and a few other writers and pounded out a pilot in a few weeks.

A cast — mainly drawn from the Toronto improv scene — was assembled, including Phillips and familiar TV face Pat Thornton as well as Patrice Goodman, Alice Moran, Kevin Vidal and Rob Norman. Each goes through plenty of wigs and wardrobe playing several different roles.

The showrunners saw Sunnyside as a place like Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, which was, ironically, a stone’s throw from the original amusement park. They both liked Parkdale’s mix of rich and poor. “There are people with money buying some really nice houses,” says Pearson, “and there are people who are basically homeless. There’s multi-ethnicity, there’s gay and straight, and they’re all jammed together in one place.”

Numbers were crunched and Winnipeg, not Toronto, won the location lottery. An older, residential neighbourhood with a Parkdale vibe was found and truckloads of cast and crew invaded. Ponies also appeared; seems Sunnyside suffers from as pony infestation. Then there are the clowns and the moon falling out of the sky. And don’t forget the open manhole where residents shout down to get answers. There’s no Internet in Sunnyside, only the hole, which is voiced, of course, by Norm Macdonald.

During the six-episode shoot last September and October (seven more episodes have already been ordered), cast and crew kept shaking their heads, saying they’d read it in the script but never believed it would be shot. Neither did Redican and Pearson, and both credit the network with encouraging them to go farther and weirder.

“It’s truly been a labour of love,” says Redican. “It’s exactly the show we’ve always wanted to do,” says Pearson.

Both are well aware that Thursdays at 8 p.m., their little Canadian-made David is up against the Goliath that is The Big Bang Theory. Sunnyside, they know, won’t be for everybody. It’s probably, in fact, just for viewers looking to get off the expressway and discover a magical place unlike anything else on TV.

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